What will the people do?
Two years ago on my first ever trip to Boulder, Colorado, a co-worker was giving me a lift back to my hotel. Unlike in Europe, a car is necessary in the US due to the sheer size of the place. You can look at a map, and something that looks close might be a 40-minute walk. Everything is so spread out with few options on public transport. We went to the parking lot to pick up her car, and upon exiting the car park I noticed an old man in his 70s was operating the toll system that let cars in and out of the parking lot. It seemed strange to me. We didn’t have such manual operators in Ireland or Germany.
Car parks are usually guarded by a barrier and a square metal box that gives you a ticket and lets you enter to park your car. Surely it would be cheaper to pay the upfront cost of a ticket machine and service it every now and again instead of employing someone to work there? And Boulder, the magical little mountain town in Colorado is infused with technology, I mean ever house you go to is going to have a Nest thermostat on the wall — surely something as simple as an automatic barrier is a giving.
I sometimes think about that old man in his little box letting cars in and out. While his job has been automated in most other places and could easily be done so in less than a day of installation, does it need to be? Is it more economically friendly to have him work his shift or have him sit at home on unemployment benefits? He’s earning money towards his pension, paying taxes and doing his part for society.
This job was giving this man a sense of purpose, and I think that’s a very powerful and important thing. He had something to do when he woke up that morning.
As technologists we work towards a life of automation making machines and robots do the job for us. Oh, the dream! But what happens to the people that lose out? What happens to societies when people have nothing to do anymore? Don’t get me wrong; I’m a believer in a better life with machines working alongside humans to make things more efficient, but I’m not naive. It’s not going to be so easy to get there. When and where do we draw the line? A lot of questions and answers need to be figured out.
With every evolution in history, people have lost out and have had to up-skill and better themselves, but I feel this shift is a little different. Technology is advancing at rapid rates, faster than it ever has before and is gunning for every job it can! And of course, with the creation of automation, there will be the creation of new jobs. Jobs that don’t exist today, it has always been this way. There are just going to be much fewer jobs to do, and the majority of the new jobs that will be available will not be for your average Joe or Josephine Soap.
Even the art of fruit picking sees automation with startups like Abundant Robotics building a machine that vacuums ripe fruit off the tree. They recently raised $10M with Google taking a bite of the apple leading the round.
I think it’s pretty apparent and nothing new to us that we’re going to see massive job losses right across the blue collar and white collar industries — from autonomous machines and automation software. When truck drivers lose their jobs to self-driving vehicles that can drive all night without having to take a break. When hundreds of thousands of corporate workers lose their jobs to new processes that have technology at the core. What will the people do? What will their sense of purpose be? What will people do from 9am to 5pm everyday?
What knock on effects will this have on society and how can we be better prepared for this? I’d love to get your thoughts below!
